Darwin Retail Planner is a powerful software tool that helps organisations integrate financial budget with retail sales budget. With Darwin, all planners and purchasers make budgets, merchandise plans and purchase decisions with the same methods and data. This enables fact based planning and synchronized decision making.

 

Key Features:

Financial Planning:

Synchronization of financial and a merchandise budget support as multi-level sales-hierarchy i.e. country-location-store type-store, which in turn supports a multi-channel strategy: online, stores, shop-in-shop, corners, etc. and facilitates the seeding of a new financial budget based on KPI’s and targets. Key features:

• Extensive information of historic sales and budgets
• Financial plan on total and product hierarchy level and split by season
• Online information about sales, markdown, pieces, retail price, gross profit and cost price

 

Merchandise Planning:

Integrated planning solution connect key business functions, including strategy, target-setting, life-cycle management, and operations to deliver better merchandise planning and execution. Key features:

• Seeding of a new merchandise plan based on financial planning
• Multiple levels of product hierarchy and free number of attributes
• Range control via targets for styles and options
• Free definition of start & end date of seasons including overlap
• Top-down and bottom-up seasonal planning
• Smart handling of never out of stock
• Save up and down in the planning hierarchy
• Manage discrepancies between different hierarchy levels

 

Assortment Planning:

Assortment planning solution helps in monitoring the assortment plan with the top line merchandise plan, automatically uploads and maps styles and colours with ERP and overviews budget and planned style colours per free defined time buckets. Other key features:

• Placeholders to support the buyers with setting of the range
• Possibility to look up and review the collection book including images
• Easy creation of new articles with copy functions
• Ability to carry out pre-defined calculations
• Upload of purchase order lines to ERP system
• Online information about pending purchase orders and stock of style colors in assortment plan

 

Open to Buy:

Retail planning solution facilitates multiple seasons and calendar on one screen, easy to use ‘shopping list’ for buyers via email and weekly monitoring of sales, margin, forward cover, closing stock and OTB.

 

Other key features:

• Visibility of expected and required closing stock: what-if simulations
• In-season reforecast
• Pre-season and in-season
• Time buckets can be weeks, months or any other definition
• Plan forward cover and stock rotation
• System supported achievement of required closing stock
• Easy seeding of sales and markdown budgets for old stock using historic sell-thru & markdowns and required closing stock percentage
• Budget split over time buckets using historic sales and markdown profiles per plan level
• Smart handling of never out of stock
• Alignment of financial and merchandise budget

 

Markdown Planning:

Markdown planning is aimed at location level to maximize profitability and reduce the overall markdown cost for the retailer. Markdown planning solution helps simplify the management of retail at the location level.

 

Other key features:

• Optimal timing, frequency and depth of markdowns to maximize profit
• Markdown proposals based on actual versus ideal sell-thru and product life cycle
• Calculates impact of markdown proposals on gross profit
• Ability to round prices or to work with price points
• Age based and cost based markdown proposals for older stock
• Ideal sell-thru curves based on reference products
• Priority values for easy selection of markdown proposals with highest priority
• Extensive reporting based on actual sell-thru per style colour: bestseller analysis